Norton Simon, Businessman and Collector, Dies at 86

By ERIC PACE

Published: June 4, 1993

Norton Simon, the restless California industrialist who parlayed a bankrupt orange-juice bottling plant into a billion-dollar conglomerate and spent more than $100 million putting together one of the country's greatest private art collections, died Wednesday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.

The immediate cause of his death was respiratory failure, said his daughter-in-law, Judy Simon. She said he had suffered for some years from Guillain- Barre syndrome, which is a paralyzing neurological disorder.

Mr. Simon, a brooding, driving man who could multiply long figures in his head, was something of a Renaissance man among the self-made business titans of his generation.

He earned international respect as an art connoisseur and patron, and he was outspoken about public affairs in California, where he made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican Senate nomination in 1970. As a regent of the University of California, he repeatedly opposed Gov. Ronald Reagan's attacks on administrators and students.

Despite his successes, he was perennially dissatisfied. "I believe in a paradoxical way of life," he once told an interviewer. "I don't believe anything is wholly right, but both right and wrong. There is a thin line between. There is a Chinese proverb that 'Life is a search for truth and there is no truth.' " Losing Interest, He Quits Business

And so Mr. Simon gave up his seat on the board of Norton Simon Inc. in 1969, only months after he had painstakingly put the company together by merging Hunt Food and Industries, long the cornerstone of his business empire, with two other prominent concerns he controlled, the McCall Corporation and the Canada Dry Corporation. The new conglomerate produced a staggering variety of products, ranging from matches to magazines to ketchup.

Asked why he had left the business at the relatively young age of 62, Mr. Simon said he wanted to concentrate on collecting art and his other interests. "When it got to the point that the business was more operations than creating, it was less intriguing to me," he said. For years he occupied himself intensely with his art collection, which came to contain thousands of objects with a total value that grew to be at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Simon and his first wife, the former Lucille Ellis, were divorced in 1970 after 37 years of marriage. In 1971, he married Jennifer Jones, the film star, on a yacht off the British coast, and she helped him with his art collecting.

Mr. Simon housed vast art holdings in the former Pasadena Art Museum, which he renovated at a reported cost of more than $3 million. In 1975 it was renamed the Norton Simon Museum of Art.

The gallery contained various art treasures for which Mr. Simon had paid $1 million or more, including a 10th-century Indian idol, the Shivapuram Nataraja. Buying the 44-inch bronze figure led to a dispute with the Indian Government; the idol was said to have been stolen and smuggled out of India.

"Yes, it was smuggled," Mr. Simon said in an interview in 1973, before the controversy was settled. "I spent between $15 million and $16 million over the last two years on Asian art, and most of it was smuggled. I don't know whether it was stolen." Tough Approach To Business and Art

Mr. Simon's tough, pragmatic approach was one reason for his success as an entrepreneur and art collector. He displayed that approach in 1965 at another London art auction where he acquired Rembrandt's portrait of his son Titus after an unusual auction-room dispute.

The top bid for the painting was thought to have been made by a London dealer, but Mr. Simon rose and demanded that the bidding be resumed, arguing that the auctioneer had failed to act on a secret signal he had given.

Several minutes of argument ensued, with dealers and collectors in the audience taking part. Then the bidding was resumed, and Mr. Simon got the canvas for $2.2 million.

Another of his strengths as a businessman and collector was his analytical skill. In his later years he would size up the strengths and weaknesses of a Maillol sculpture or a Van Gogh canvas with the same flair, gusto and insight he had applied to deciding which companies to invest in and how to infuse them with new life.

Despite his toughness, he retained a soft demeanor and had a way of disarming visitors by speaking frankly about his emotions. He was a longtime champion of sensitivity training and encounter groups in business and employed three psychologists on his corporate staff.

"My hostilities are usually showing," he once observed. "But I do get rid of anger very rapidly. Some people are born with a peace of mind. I was not. I don't like to be rough; it has been difficult being firm with people."

Mr. Simon was perennially on the outlook for promising investments, and over the years he bought interests in dozens of companies. He would look for companies whose profits were being held down by stodgy executives and whose stock was undervalued and widely held. When he spotted a likely target, he would buy stock, generally quietly, sometimes on his own, sometimes through the Hunt company.

Then, armed with a substantial block of shares, he would start telling the existing management what it should do to improve operations.